I have been looking for any personal finance software that can help keep track of my investments. So far, I have come up with zip. Maybe someone else has had a better experience.

Here is what I am looking for:

Syncs transactions with brokerage accounts.

Allows looking at performance on a consolidated basis across accounts. I own a few stocks across multiple accounts. I want to look at how on a consolidated basis.

Includes dividends and reinvested dividends intelligently into calculating performance.

Allows XIRR calculations by security. XIRR immediately shortens the list. Total gain/loss on a stock is not a very interesting number.

Ideally, I should be able to take any window of time to see how a stock has performed in that window. Also, of course, on a consolidated basis.

Schwab, of course, has nothing even close. They are so scared of making errors that they throw up a warning window every time I try to download a csv file. Can’t trust them to venture out this far.

I like mint.com for keeping track of expenses etc. but their investment management totally sucks. Pretty charts that are all horribly wrong, worthless or both.

A friend told me that Quicken takes care of all of these requirements. Unfortunately, Quicken gives the Mac platform short shrift. The last version for the Mac is from 2007 and the reviews are not good. No 30 day trial, so I passed. If someone has used this version and thinks it works, leave a comment.

iBank from iggsoft was supposed solve this very problem. The poor cousin treatment that Mac owners get on software for personal use. Tried it out. Couldn’t even set it up. No way to upload a csv! At least I couldn’t figure it out. For the transactions I could upload it seemed like it didn’t meet my criteria.

So my search continues. In the meanwhile, I put together a Google Spreadsheets solution, which meets all my criteria, except the windowing. Google allows you to call the price on a stock as a formula which is quite neat. The only problem with this is that transactions must be downloaded from the brokerage account and cut pasted into the worksheet every once in a while. I don’t trade much, so my solution works for me, kind of. At least until someone comes up with exactly what I want. But does that ever happen?

3 responses to “Looking for Investment Management Tools”

With Quicken 2007 for Mac still running on Rosetta, it will not work in Lion, and Intuit has no plans to update it, so there are a lot of people looking for anything to manage our assets.

I’ve looked into iBank – at least it doesn’t crash, and SEE Finance – it appears to support more investment types (like CDs) but I can’t really tell, because it crashes within a minute of my launching it. So neither of those is viable to me.

I’m actually considering purchasing Quicken Premiere for WIndows, and running it under Parallels or VMware. It will probably do the best job of importing QIF, too.

I will follow this thread to see if anyone else has another possibilities… and now back to my google search …

I just found MoneyDance http://moneydance.com/mac – cross-platform; I think its written in Java. Imported from quicken with only a few “mistakes” — it interprets a few transaction types and splits differently than Quicken did, but with some simple edits all my account balances now match. It downloads from my financial institutions, but there are some things I haven’t figured out, having multiple accounts at the same place. Decent performance, nice built-in reports and graphs, but I couldn’t figure out how to sort on different columns.